Step-by-Step Guide: How to turn your Shopify store into an App?
According to recent statistics, ecommerce sales have surpassed 1 trillion dollars worldwide. A lot of shoppers these days prefer mobile shopping for numerous reasons, so a solid digital presence is crucial for online business owners. While optimizing your Shopify store for mobile browsers is essential, how can you turn your Shopify store into an app? A dedicated shopping app is needed to really take advantage of the internet era. In this blog, we’ll discuss how Shopify business owners can turn their online store into a powerful mobile app to increase customer engagement, sales, and retention.
Benefits of Having a Shopify Mobile App
Better Mobile Shopping Experience
A Shopify mobile app developed using expert Shopify app development services will provide customers with a more seamless shopping experience compared to browsing the mobile site. Apps offer features tailored for mobile, like easy navigation, faster load times, and a smoother cart/checkout process. Consumers can shop how they want on the go.
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Increased Engagement and Sales
If you know how to turn your Shopify store into an app, you can provide a great user experience. Customers will spend more time within the app browsing products and making purchases. Shopify merchants can expect higher repeat visits, longer sessions, and more impulse buys, leading to increased cart values. All of this helps boost retailer sales and order volumes.
Convenient Owned Marketing Channel
A Shopify mobile app offers merchants their own owned channel to market and promote to customers. They can leverage push notifications, in-app emails, and banners to drive engagement. This owned engagement and marketing channel is not dependent on paid social ads or search results, which makes it very cost-effective. Merchants enjoy more control over the customer experience.
Higher Visibility and Discovery
Listing the applications on app stores unlocks a new captive and highly targeted audience. Installations can be organically driven by app store search and browsing. Having an appealing app listing page increases brand awareness and consideration. Professional Shopify website development services and Shopify migration services help create an app that attracts more new users.
Simplified Payment Experience
Integrating a payment gateway allows customers to quickly checkout from within the app with options like saved cards and digital wallets. This reduces friction in the checkout flow, aiding merchants in higher transaction conversion rates. With expert Shopify ecommerce development services, merchants can streamline the entire shopping and payment process for higher customer satisfaction.
Enhanced Loyalty and Retention
A tremendous native app experience engenders higher loyalty and retention from shoppers. They are likely to revisit more frequently and make repeat/subscription purchases, which has a considerable impact on merchants’ lifetime customer value. Shopify store development services help unlock these important loyalty metrics for merchants.
How to Turn Your Shopify Store into an App: Step-by-Step Process
Optimize the Existing Shopify Store
With expert Shopify website development services, optimize images, code loading, and other elements for a seamless shopping experience across devices. Ensure consistent branding and navigation and that all features work well on mobile before building the app.
Choose a Trusted Shopify App Builder
Leverage Shopify app development services to carefully evaluate options in the Shopify App Store. Select a feature-rich, customizable, and affordable solution to convert the store design for the highest quality app experience.
Design and Customize the App Interface
Leverage the intuitive drag-and-drop tools provided by many app builders to design a cleanly optimized UI. Add logo, colors, sections, etc., to replicate the store look using professional Shopify store development services.
Configure Product Catalog, Payments and Features
With assistance from Shopify e-commerce development services, the existing catalog can be integrated and enabled for carts, orders, etc., through automatic syncing. Also, it sets up payments, push notifications, categories, and other store components.
Connect the App with the Shopify Backend
Leverage Shopify migration services expertise to smoothly establish a connection between the app and the shop backend so that all data remains seamlessly in sync in real-time without manual updates.
Thoroughly Test the App Functionality
Check all features, design responsiveness across devices, and the overall shopping flow end-to-end with the help of Shopify experts. Ensure glitch-free performance before submitting to app stores.
Publish the Application on App Stores
Leverage Shopify migration services to efficiently complete the app listing process as per each store format and guidelines for maximum visibility and installability.
Limitations of Creating App Directly on Shopify
No Native App Support
The Shopify platform does not allow merchants to directly build and publish native iOS or Android apps. Apps developed within Shopify are always web-based, which affects mobile performance and user experience.
Higher Development Costs
To create genuinely native Shopify mobile apps, merchants would need to hire separate mobile developers to build the app frontend and backend API integration. This can cost anywhere from $20K to over $100K just for essential app development without ongoing support.
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Sustained Maintenance Costs
Even after the initial app development, merchants would have to allocate additional budgets every few months towards app updates, changes, or bug fixes. Integrating with new Shopify or third-party features also requires development work. These ongoing maintenance costs add up substantially over time.
Lack of App Store Visibility
Without relying on third-party app stores, apps developed directly on Shopify miss out on the significant new user acquisition potential from app store rankings, search, and browsing. It limits the discoverability, reach, and growth opportunities for merchants. Learn how to turn your Shopify store into an app without Shopify.
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Complex Ongoing Operations
Managing the codebase, integrations, and releases for two separate mobile app versions introduces technical complexity. It also requires in-house development expertise or regular engagement with developers, which adds workforce costs.
Omnichannel Challenges
It becomes difficult for merchants to achieve feature parity across web and mobile experiences. The direct development approach also increases the effort needed to scale the business operation across other sales channels like wholesale, offline, etc.
This is where using dedicated Shopify app builders and development services can help overcome many such limitations cost-effectively. These expert solutions allow even novice merchants to capitalize on mobile with streamlined native app capabilities.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I build an app for my Shopify store myself without hiring developers?
While Shopify doesn’t directly support building mobile apps, there are app builder platforms that allow you to create apps for your store without coding knowledge. These solutions handle the technical implementation for you.
How long does the whole process of converting my store into an app take?
On average, it takes around 2-4 weeks to fully convert your Shopify store into mobile apps using an app builder solution. The significant steps like design, development, and testing can be completed within two weeks, while app store submission and approval may take another 1-2 weeks.
Will my customers need to download the app to continue shopping, or can they still use the mobile website?
Your customers can continue shopping from both the mobile app and the responsive mobile website. The app only provides an enhanced native mobile experience and is not a mandatory requirement for purchases.
Conclusion
Knowing how to turn your Shopify store into an app is a strategic decision for businesses looking to meet customers where they are spending most of their time – on smartphones and tablets. By leveraging reliable app builder platforms and their Shopify app development services, even novice entrepreneurs can quickly transform their online store into a fully-featured mobile application. This allows them to provide shoppers with an enhanced shopping experience and drive higher engagement and sales on their own owned marketing channel. They can reach more customers, build their brand, and ultimately grow their thriving e-commerce business in the rapidly expanding landscape of mobile commerce.
Connect with Web App Vault and our team of expert Shopify developers and designers today. We can help evaluate your specific needs, recommend the best mobile app builder for your store, and design & develop a high-converting native app that surpasses your customer expectations.
